By Kieron Gillen on January 22nd, 2009 at 8:21 am.
I wanted to post about this quickly. We’ve mentioned Plain Sight before, but the charming and sociopathic multiplayer action game has just entered its Open Beta. You can download its client from here. In fact, that’s what I’ve just done, as Eurogamer want me to write about it. Is it good? Let’s hope so. Because the trailer certainly is…
Yay!
22/01/2009 at 08:33 Wedge says:
Oh man this reminds me of the awesome graffiti mode from the old Tony Hawk games, like combined with some crazy Mario Galaxy stuff or something. In any case, furiously downloading as hard as I can.
22/01/2009 at 08:40 Agrjag says:
Ever since Worms, I always enjoy games where kamikazi gets you somewhere.
22/01/2009 at 08:50 Scott Kevill says:
That is an awesome trailer. The camera control is great, and of course the art style is very nicely done.
22/01/2009 at 08:51 Stuk says:
Wow.
[X] Pretty
[X] Funny
[?] Fun to play – Lets hope so
22/01/2009 at 09:50 SKACE says:
I laughted so much at this vid :))) This game have to be great!!!
22/01/2009 at 09:57 ad_hominem says:
Downloaded, but I can’t seem to find anybody online to play with. Still, looks like it will be great fun when it’s up and running.
22/01/2009 at 10:02 Wedge says:
No clue what it plays like as a “game” as I couldn’t find anyone to play with. The jumping and dashing around bit is quite fun though. Just make sure you increase the amount of air dashes you can do, which is set at “1″ by default.
The level that has you hopping on pieces of a giant destroyed robot in space seems to show off the cool factor the best, though it’s also by far the buggiest level in terms of actually sticking to objects and figuring your gravity out.
Oh and make sure you run the setup.exe it comes with if you don’t have the XNA framework already installed, because it uses that and will obviously fail to load if you don’t have it.
22/01/2009 at 10:06 ad_hominem says:
Ok, I managed to get into a game, but for the life of me I couldn’t work out how to explode. It says it’s the ‘e’ button, but I was repeatedly pressing it and it still didn’t work.
22/01/2009 at 10:48 Meat Circus says:
The monkeys behind this were at the Thinkosium, correct?
They were charmingly lovely, and I wanted to keep them in a cage and feed them nuts and play dressing-up with them.
I tried to play this at the Eurogamer expo, but there was chronic slowdown, and I couldn’t. Which is a shame because it looked ace. A 21st Century Bomberman?
22/01/2009 at 10:50 ad_hominem says:
Ok, you can ignore my last comment now, I figured out what the hell was going on.
Overall, very fun indeed. Check out my blog (click on my name) for a more detailed account of the fun, plus some pics of it in action.
22/01/2009 at 11:08 alseT says:
Wow the physics in this game are awesome! After trying to achieve escape velocity on the smaller moon for about 20 minutes and failing, I managed a small orbit around one tube on the third map
22/01/2009 at 11:30 Ging says:
Meat: they were indeed – I’ve still got a card somewhere with hand written game url on the back.
22/01/2009 at 13:07 Pie21 says:
Too bad the networking is still buggy as hell. Me and a friend were trying for an hour to just get in the same game, trying everything from forwarding ports through routers and firewalls to just attempting a LAN game over hamachi.
No success. It’s a shame, because I’ve been following this for a while now.
22/01/2009 at 13:17 Tei says:
I have to say that this video is awesome.
Creating videos is a art at itself. I don’t know If the game will be fun, but the video is. And judging from the video, the game will be very good, with some exploration, quick reflex, actions, deathmach..
¥€$!!!!!!
22/01/2009 at 13:41 Aubrey says:
Had drinks with these guys last night. They were worriedly watching their web server crash from their iphones and we saw the actor Kevin Eldon in the pub, amongst others. It was ace!
22/01/2009 at 13:48 JohnG says:
Okay.. tried it.. found a game.. the tactic that served me well.. run around randomly, jump a lot, hammer the left mouse button, explode every time you get a point or two… there seems to be very little skill.. everyone moves too fast and the camera rotates itself a lot so it’s more often than not pointing in the wrong direction. Hard to tell what on earth you’re supposed to do
22/01/2009 at 14:17 Robin says:
Hey Folks,
Great to hear your feedback regarding the (rather shaky) launch of the PS open beta. Honestly we weren’t expecting the response we got, so all our servers melted.
Regarding the bugs, we’re currently working like crazy to fix as many as possible, especially the networking! We’re going to be patching the game every few days, so if it’s currently not working for you please keep checking back!
Cheers
Robin
(beatnik games)
22/01/2009 at 14:21 Pags says:
I was going to post about this on the forums yesterday, but didn’t because I half-expected a post to go up about it soon. And what do you know, I was right. My Hivemind sense was tingling.
Anyway, I can’t actually play this because the .Net Framework 3.5 installer just doesn’t make any progress at all. This makes me a sad panda, etc.
22/01/2009 at 14:24 Heliocentric says:
Robin, your demo can be a beta, your beta can be a demo, as long as the thing you want us to pay for works we dont really care. ^_^
Great central mechanics you got there. Any chance of a teamplay mode where if your explosion kills a teammate he detonates too creating massive multiplier potential? But i dont mean stand red vs blue teams, but instead some kind of friend list system where your friends are your friends.
Mutually assured destuction multiplier!
22/01/2009 at 14:30 Gabanski83 says:
Installed it, hosted a game, got one other person joining, but couldn’t work out how to explode. Plus the other guy was intent on just attaking me all the time, rather than messing about seeing what else he could do.
Is the in game server browser borked, or what? and how do you explode and bank points? Plus how do you get more than one point at once? Is it not possible to ‘paint’ more than one area at once?
22/01/2009 at 14:58 James says:
@Gabanski – you can only explode when you have some kill points, to do it press ‘E’. You don’t score anythign for painting, although a paint mode may exist some time. :)
22/01/2009 at 15:19 Robin says:
Hi Helicentric!
Yup, we’re going to have a teamplay mode! We’re going to have teams sharing a banked score – like ‘ the weakest link’ with a twist ;)
It’s a real shame that our networking went splat… but as we’re such a small studio, the only way to really test something like this is to release a version into the wild!
Cheers
Robin
22/01/2009 at 15:38 Heliocentric says:
Networking is super critical in a game where tenths of a second will seperate a great score from useless death.
Hope you crack it.
22/01/2009 at 17:01 Thecolours says:
this game is visual stunning for being so simplistic. I hope more games like these come out of small XNA studios.
22/01/2009 at 17:18 Broslovski says:
Downloading currently. Also, Robocute Deathspasm would be an AMAZING name for a band… :D
22/01/2009 at 21:10 PleasingFungus says:
Amazing trailer! Convinced me, I’m downloading now. (Also, I’m going to second Broslovski’s point.)
23/01/2009 at 19:48 Blather Blob says:
Well, that was disappointing. In about 10 minutes of play, on a server with 5 players, I don’t think I ever got closer to anyone than about 2 buildings away, and only ever saw anyone that close for less than half a second before they would shoot off, presumably trying to get closer to someone else. Though someone did manage to kill me once (though I didn’t ever actally see them, so they were either behind me or it was an explosion), and there were two explosions, so a couple of contacts between players must have happened. In fact, one player had 10 points (though all the rest of us had 0).
It’s very pretty though, and the trailer is great. But I still want to play the game I saw in the trailer.
24/01/2009 at 02:06 Melf_Himself says:
I couldn’t actually run the game. Anyone else had that problem?
24/01/2009 at 02:22 Blather Blob says:
@Melf: Did you run setup.exe (instead of the .msi directly), to be sure the XNA Framework (and .NET) is installed? Other than that, no clue.